The Garden of Chesil Beach

My father, who rather disapproved of nature, used to tell the story of the Vicar saying to one of his older parishioners: 'Isn't it wonderful what the Lord and you have done with this garden,' and the old man replying: 'Yes, but you should have seen it when the Lord had it all to himself.'



There are many replies one could make to this, in particular the one that nature's (or God's if you like) way of creating gardens doesn't match with a cottage garden in an English village, or with making things convenient for human beings at all. However, sometimes nature does create a landscape that humans recognise as a garden. I think the word for garden in Persian is the same as 'paradise.'



On two separate walks on our holiday last week, we found paradise at the land side of Chesil Beach, between Cogden Beach and West Bexington, in front of Burton Mere. And it is really just the result of nature being left to itself - I checked with the National Trust.



When we were last in West Dorset, twenty years ago, local farmers were still able to drive down to the beach to collect gravel, and all that grew in that area were a few seakales. Now the seakales have proliferated




but in addition, there's a multitude of species: horned poppies, teasels in bloom, woody nightshade, sea pinks, mallow, wild carrot - and many more.



To walk along those gravel paths, taking in that treasure of colour and shape was to be absorbed, somehow, into beauty itself, to experience a joy that can perhaps best be expressed musically in the sound of the shorelarks overhead, probably not in words.


Seen against the backdrop of a clear, Mediterranean blue sky, this garden lifted me into a state of bliss, there is no other word for it.





Behind the beach garden is Burton Mere, itself a thing of great beauty, where the sere dead stems from last year float above this year's lush greenness, where the frogs chirrup and croak in the evenings -



-where a wonderful blue vetch, or maybe wild pea, flowers like the sky come down to earth -



and even my enemy the bindweed - contained here by the other vibrant growth - snakes upwards to become a thing of grace and elegance, supported by a ruinous fence conveniently left there in the service of the picturesque.